Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He teaches courses on global Indigenous movements, borders, and social movements. He is a scholar of Indigenous and Latinx histories, migration, social movements, and borderlands. Dr. Ramirez-Lopez earned his Ph.D. in history at UC San Diego.

Prior to joining as faculty in the Department of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Ramirez-Lopez was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA (2023-2025). He was also a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at Dartmouth College (2021-2023).

He is at work on his book project, Democracy from Below: The Communal Worlds Indigenous Migrants Created which explores the early Oaxacan diasporic generation who labored and lived between southern Mexico and  the US/Mexican Pacific Coast in the late twentieth century. The book centers the stories of migrant individuals, communities, and organizations  revealing the Indigenous politics they enacted and the multiracial and multiethnic efforts they pursued with Mexican, Chicanx, Latinxs, Native, and white allies across multiple territories.

He serves as chair of the Mexican Studies Section of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) of the American Historical Association (AHA) for 2025-2026. Additionally, he is  a member of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA histories of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for 2024-2028.

Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is See Xánh a (Triqui) and Putleco. His family and roots are from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. He is a member of the board of directors for the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO) and an advisor for the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), California.